XELIO 10.1”

One thing may be said with certainty about the Walmart-branded Xelio P1001A-BK, i.e. the consumer goods outlet’s 10” tablet: It sure isn’t made for the geeks and techies. Now that’s a good news/bad news-style assessment for the everyday customer: While this Xelio is easy to use straight out of the box, its technical specs represent the absolute minimum in such a device.

Most (least?) notable is the insanely low 512 MB of RAM and 4 GB of internal storage space. The sole positivity to be gleaned from the former is the pleasant feeling of nostalgia for the days when RAM measured in megabytes, and the latter figure is actually a bit of misdirection from Walmart. The truth is that actually accessible for, you know, storage is around 2 GB.

A micro SD card port helps things somewhat, but the combination of Android 4.1 OS, low RAM and slow processor will cause most apps over most WiFi connections to perform far below ideal. Speaking of apps, incidentally, you don’t get none in the Xelio P1001A-BK. Google adherents, please look elsewhere. And what can be done in the *listed* five hours of battery time, anyway?

For $99, one shouldn’t expect too much. On the other hand, these days, a would-be tablet owner shouldn’t have to search too hard to find something superior – even at this seriously budget price.